Electronic mail (e-mail) usages have become omnipresent in everyday use for online users. Commercial senders or merchants send many of the messages that users receive in their e-mail accounts. These messages include account signup confirmations, order confirmations, receipts, shipping status and newsletters. In other cases, users wish to receive these sorts of messages in their inbox, such as shipping notifications. On the other hand, the users do not want messages to distract them or they are simply uninterested in receiving the messages, such as a newsletter.
Currently, users face at least the following unfortunate situations: 1. E-mail messages that the user wishes to see are forwarded to the junk folder. For example, this includes messages relating to account signup confirmations, account signup verifications, order confirmation, order status, and shipping confirmation. 2. E-mail messages that the user does not wish to receive (but are legitimate) are marked as junk, such as newsletters, sales e-mail messages, e-mail messages that the users might be interested in.
In the first situation, it is problematic because the merchants wish those messages are indeed delivered, because the merchants do not wish to receive inquiries from users who are expecting to receive these types of e-mail messages. In this case, both the sender and the recipient have an interest in the message being delivered to the inbox without being marked as spam or junk. This is also especially true for any website that requires account signup verification.
Both parties would like a solution (senders and recipients) to these problems. Solutions to date have relied on rudimentary tools and don't work very effectively. For example, users end up using a blunt tool (such as the junk button and blacklist) to make the problems go away, which further complicates the ability to receive legitimate messages from the sender.
Some senders try to address this situation by including instructions on how to add the sender to the safelist or whitelist, by joining the sender score certified program, or by using SenderID. Unfortunately, these solutions are not widely adopted and result in frustration on the user and sender's part. Some users may not follow the instructions correctly. Other attempts take a different approach by petitioning to the users in response to receiving the user's e-mail address/account. However, many times users wish to use different e-mail addresses for receiving such types of e-mail messages from those used when signing up or registering the user accounts for online purchases.